In the days since the riots there is one group I would like to have heard more from than we have so far – those who who saw the riots in their streets in the 80s, or who themselves took part. What do they think and feel about what has changed for them and their children's lives in the inner cities, if much has at all?

This thought came to me forcefully when, in the second night of rioting in 2011, disturbances spread to Brixton. Although a relatively minor development in the context of the violence and looting as a whole, it struck a personal chord. The first riot I covered as a reporter followed the shooting by police, then as now, of a black person, Cherry Groce, during a raid on her home, early in the morning of 29 September 1985.

The police were looking for her son Michael, to question him about an armed robbery. Their intelligence was poor. They had no idea that his family was in the house in Normandy Road but that Michael Groce wasn't. The raid was led by Inspector Douglas Lovelock, an authorised firearms officer (AFO). At the time there were 3,000 or so AFOs in the Metropolitan police, who were licensed to carry weapons on duty.

He told the trial at which he was acquitted of all charges that he just saw "a shape coming towards me … and a shot rang out".

The trouble began when around 50 youths tried to get to the house and were held back by police. In the early hours it was a protest; later it became a riot.

By late afternoon and through the night the numbers of riot police and people grew in the area as the violence spread to Stockwell. The number of reporters also grew as it became clear that this was the most serious disturbance in the area since 1981.

Covering a riot required a careful technique: basically, getting close enough to see what is happening without getting flattened by a rush from one side or the other. Then you filed fractured accounts of the action in bite-size pieces of a few paragraphs at a time, which were stitched together back at the office. That meant finding a working telephone box. But it could be tricky if a group of rioters came round the corner and saw you in the well-lit booth, notebook in hand, sweating on the construction of your first paragraph.

There were no mobiles, well, not in general use. A very canny reporter from the Press Association was that night carrying the first one I had ever seen. It was about the size of a brick and he kept it very sensibly in a scruffy carrier bag.

Street sense was everything; reporters, especially this one, dodged in and out of the rioters and police lines hoping that adrenaline would continue to suppress fear.

One of the heroes of the press was my colleague Carole Dawson. On that Saturday afternoon she spotted some young men outside the Groce family home who appeared to know Michael Groce. She persuaded three of them to take her in a van to the flat in Peckham where he was hiding and where he gave her an exclusive interview before they dropped her back.

Cherry Groce, who was paralysed by the shooting and died last year, was the first but not the only casualty that day. David Hodge was a freelance photographer who specialised in science photography. He wanted to broaden his experience so he pinned his business card on the wall near the picture desk at the Sunday Telegraph. For major events that required more photographers than were on staff, picture editors turned to the wall and contacted whoever was available.

In the riots of 1981 there had been little looting of local shops but this time the thefts appeared indiscriminate. Hodge was photographing looters at a jewellery shop when he was attacked. At first he didn't appear to be too badly injured but he had a relapse, went into a coma and died 19 days later. Each year the Observer gives the Hodge photographic award in his memory.

Witnessing the Brixton riots was also an odd, not to say slightly surreal, return to my childhood. At one point in the evening I looked up and saw flames from a number of burning cars illuminating the flat where I spent the first six years of my life.

My mother and I lived at my grandfather's home. He had run a bookmakers from the flat over a commercial photographer's shop on the corner of Wynne Road and Brixton Road in the early 50s. As protesters moved from Normandy Road along Brixton Road to Brixton police station, the focus of a great deal of pent-up frustration by young black men angry at the way they were treated by the police, they passed the flat, which in 1985 was above an Asian community housing association.

Around then I heard the word "underclass" for the first time. Douglas Hurd, a liberal Tory home secretary, told a small group of journalists that he felt that it was his responsibility to prevent its growth in size. Once more there is talk of an underclass. It would be interesting to know what the Brixton class of 85 think when they hear today's politicians' plans to prevent this "ever happening again".